I was about 10 when I read Quentin Reynolds’ YA biography “Custer’s Last Stand” (1951), a perfect book for an Oklahoma boy like me intoxicated by the surfeit of cowboy shows on 1950s TV. Reynolds ignited a George Armstrong Custer brushfire in my imagination.

In subsequent years, that Custer fire cooled – but only after I’d read many other books, visited his birthplace (New Rumley, Ohio), the Little Bighorn Battlefield (Montana) and Monroe, Mich., where he lived and met his future wife.

Many today do not so much revere Custer as revile him as a salient symbol of American imperialism in the West, a war criminal, an arrogant, even insane commander (see Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel “Little Big Man”) who led his men to slaughter in 1876, when Lakota, Cheyenne and other Native American warriors swarmed over his detachment like ants on a discarded cupcake.

In recent years, however, there has been a little pushback. Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand” (2010) reveals a more complicated Custer, and now a principal Custer scholar, Thom Hatch, offers “Glorious War: The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer” (St. Martin’s Press, 384 pp., $28.99). It chronicles Custer’s little-known but significant contributions to the Union cause.

Hatch’s credentials are impressive. He has published two major reference books on Custer – as well as biographies of Black Kettle, Butch Cassidy and other frontier figures. And “Glorious War” bears all the marks of his substantial scholarship: battle maps, lots of specific detail, more than 25 pages of endnotes and a lengthy bibliography.

Hatch begins in 1863 at Gettysburg, Pa. Custer, 23, and his 2,300 Michigan men face Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry, 6,000 strong, about to attack the Union rear during Pickett’s Charge. Custer, says the author, was “on the threshold of becoming a legend.”

Then Hatch swoops us back to New Rumley, where young Autie Custer received an appointment to West Point. He did not distinguish himself in the academy’s classrooms, and Hatch shows us a frisky trickster Custer amassing myriad demerits (dancing on the edge of dismissal) and graduating last in his class.

Still, says Hatch, he “excelled in popularity and leadership.” When the Civil War erupted, Custer immediately stood out, from Bull Run forward.

We see his fearlessness in battle. Repeatedly, he led the cavalry charges he ordered, braving the fiercest fire. He lost some horses, got nicked and shocked, but was never seriously wounded.

His men deeply respected him, and his aggressiveness earned him quick battlefield promotions – and something fairly new at the time: media celebrity. The newspapers and magazines loved this Boy General, charging the enemy, saber pointing forward, his yellow locks streaming in the wind.

Throughout, Hatch takes us back and forth from battlefield to home front. We watch Custer meet, court and win (slowly, slowly) Elizabeth Bacon, the daughter of a Monroe judge who initially had little use for this brazen, penniless young man. (The Custers’ 1864 honeymoon train stopped in Cleveland.)

Although Hatch intercuts the stories of other principals – Gens. George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, nemeses Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee – his focus remains sharply on Custer, his movements, his tactics, his contributions. After Appomattox, an appreciative Gen. Philip Sheridan awarded Custer the table used for the surrender signing. (It’s now in the Smithsonian.)

Hatch’s research and knowledge are formidable; his prose, clear and accessible, even when he’s describing the chaotic intricacies of battle – and of human relationships.

But it’s unfortunate that Hatch’s diction, blurring the line between scrutiny and celebration, sometimes resembles a PR release from Custer Inc. The applause continues until the penultimate sentence calling Custer “among the greatest of cavalry commanders.”

And some will be surprised to read what appears to be a kind of justification for Custer’s unconscionable 1868 slaughter of noncombatants at the Battle (or Massacre) of Washita in Oklahoma – “his actions [were] under orders,” Hatch explains.

Hatch’s patent admiration does not diminish the scope of his considerable achievement, but it does add a touch of tendentiousness to a recipe that doesn’t require any.

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